even in his provincial days at sudminster solomon cohen had distinguished himself by his anglican mispronunciation of hebrew and his insistence on a minister who spoke english and looked like a christian clergyman; and he had set a precedent in the congregation by docking the 'e' of his patronymic. there are many ways of concealing from the briton your shame in being related through a pedigree of three thousand years to aaron, the high priest of israel, and cohn is one of the simplest and most effective. once, taken to task by a pietist, solomon defended himself by the quibble that hebrew has no vowels. but even this would not account for the whittling away of his 'solomon.' 's. cohn' was the insignium over his clothing establishment. not that he was anxious to deny his jewishness—was not the shop closed on saturdays?—he was merely anxious not to obtrude it. 'when we are in england, we are in england,' he would say, with his talmudic sing-song.
[50]s. cohn was indeed a personage in the seaport of sudminster, and his name had been printed on voting papers, and, what is more, he had at last become a town councillor. really the citizens liked his stanch adherence to his ancient faith, evidenced so tangibly by his sabbath shutters: even the christian clothiers bore him goodwill, not suspecting that s. cohn's saturday losses were more than counterbalanced by the general impression that a man who sacrificed business to religion would deal more fairly by you than his fellows. and his person, too, had the rotundity which the ratepayer demands.
but twin with his town councillor's pride was his pride in being gabbai (treasurer) of the little synagogue tucked away in a back street: in which for four generations prayer had ebbed and flowed as regularly as the tides of the sea, with whose careless rovers the worshippers did such lucrative business. the synagogue, not the sea, was the poetry of these eager traffickers: here they wore phylacteries and waved palm-branches and did other picturesque things, which in their utter ignorance of catholic or other ritual they deemed unintelligible to the heathen and a barrier from mankind. very imposing was solomon cohn in his official pew under the reading platform, for there is nothing which so enhances a man's dignity in the synagogue as the consideration of his christian townsmen. that is one of the earliest stages of anglicization.
